Design Miami 2025: Make. Believe. Brings Imagination to Life Through Craft, Innovation, and Material Poetry

Design Miami 2025 returned to Miami Beach with an edition that embraced transformation—of materials, of ideas, and of the relationship between craft and imagination. Closing out the fair’s 20th anniversary celebrations, Design Miami 2025 invited visitors into a world shaped by Make. Believe., a theme that encouraged designers to blur the line between the tangible and the fantastical. What emerged was a layered, multisensory fair defined by narrative-driven installations, heritage craft reimagined through innovation, and environments that shifted perception through light, scale, and material exploration.

Curated by Glenn Adamson, this year’s theme examined what becomes possible when technique meets imagination. Adamson framed Make. Believe. as a meditation on design’s capacity to “shape the world not as it is, but as it could be,” a sentiment that resonated across the fair’s most compelling works. From monumental ceramics to iridescent finishes, botanical stone landscapes to reconstituted wood inspired by ancient textile traditions, the 21st edition revealed the ever-expanding cultural power of contemporary design.

Design in Miami: A Year-Round Landscape Shaped by Public Art

Design Miami has long been anchored in a city where design is part of an ongoing cultural rhythm, and this year’s fair underscored that connection through one of its most popular installations: Katie Stout’s mirrored, interactive carousel, presented as part of the Gargantua’s Thumb commission. Playful, reflective, and immediately engaging, the carousel invited visitors of all ages into a whimsical world of sculptural forms and imaginative characters that seemed to shimmer and shift with every rotation.

 

The full commission extended beyond the fairgrounds into the Miami Design District, where additional large-scale sculptures and suspended orbs transformed the neighborhood into an immersive public art experience. Together, the fair installation and the district-wide commission reinforced Miami’s year-round identity as a global destination for design, public art, and creative experimentation. With Gargantua’s Thumb on view through spring 2026, Miami’s design landscape continues to inspire long after December’s festivities conclude.

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A Fair Defined by Material Innovation and Narrative Craft

Across more than 80 exhibitors, the 2025 edition revealed a renewed emphasis on material storytelling and technical experimentation. Iridescent surfaces shifted with movement, stone botanicals reimagined nature in sculptural permanence, and traditional craft techniques appeared alongside digitally influenced pattern languages.

Miami galleries participated with growing visibility, while international studios expanded the fair’s narrative with deep dives into cultural heritage, sensory immersion, and hybrid forms. Below are the presentations that best embodied the spirit of Make. Believe.

Lefebvre & Fils: Monumental Ceramics Rooted in Memory

For its fourth consecutive participation, Lefebvre & Fils Gallery debuted five monumental ceramic sculptures by French artist Laurent Dufour, created in collaboration with Aurélien Gendras. Standing between two and 2.2 meters tall, each work — Visage de femme (Blue), L’Oiseau (Green), La Famille (Yellow), L’Ours (White), and Mineral — was crafted in a single firing, an extraordinary technical feat achieved with large-scale kilns.

Drawing on archetype, myth, and the spiritual tension between materiality and transformation, Dufour’s totemic forms appeared ancient yet strikingly contemporary. Their raw and glazed surfaces caught the light throughout the day, subtly shifting in tone and texture. The installation also marked Lefebvre & Fils’ 145th anniversary, a milestone for a gallery that continues to bridge tradition and innovation through ceramic art.

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Mindy Solomon Gallery: Dawn — A Celebration of Maker Culture

 

Miami-based Mindy Solomon Gallery offered one of the fair’s most inviting atmospheres with Dawn, a maker-focused environment centered on the theme of beginnings. A warm palette of yellows, oranges, pinks, and reds enveloped a multi-layered, stacked presentation featuring works by Amber Cowan, Dee Clements, Donté Hayes, Frances Trombly, hettler.tüllmann, Jaiik Lee, Jane Yang-D’Haene, Jiha Moon, Kelsie Rudolph, Linda Lopez, Terri Friedman, Vadis Turner, and Yuki Ando.

Craft materials spanned basketry, textiles, ceramics, glass, and inventive uses of repurposed organic and inorganic matter. Throughout the week, the booth welcomed a steady flow of collectors and visitors — many engaging directly with Mindy Solomon — a testament to the gallery’s essential role in elevating contemporary craft within Miami’s cultural landscape.

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Henge: A Collector’s Lounge of Architectural Serenity

In its Design Miami debut, Italian luxury brand Henge unveiled an immersive Collector’s Lounge designed by Ugo Cacciatori, blending architectural rigor with material warmth. Vertical walls clad in pale gold metal captured the natural light streaming across Pride Park, creating a luminous backdrop that shifted with each hour.

Modular seating, sculptural tables, and refined textile layers shaped intimate gathering zones, while the dramatic, backlit violet quartzite bar offered a striking focal point. A suspended Murano glass installation added chromatic depth, reinforcing Henge’s ability to merge artisanal tradition with contemporary spatial design. The installation deepened the brand’s Miami footprint following the opening of its Design District showroom in 2024.

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ALPI × Stephen Burks Man Made: A Cultural Tapestry Reimagined in Wood

Italian surface innovator ALPI partnered with Stephen Burks Man Made to present The Lost Cloth Object, one of the most culturally engaged installations of the edition. Rooted in the textile traditions of the Kuba Kingdom in today’s Democratic Republic of Congo, the project translated raffia palm–woven Kuba cloth patterns into ALPI’s advanced reconstituted wood veneers, especially those within the Legacy collection.

Born from extensive cultural research — including a week-long workshop in Kinshasa with contemporary Kuba artisans — the installation comprised a rocking stool, rocking ottoman, and a curved partition displayed on an organic platform. Together, the works honored Kuba heritage while proposing new expressions for the future. Curator Glenn Adamson noted that the “infusion of pattern and masterful handling of timber” made the installation a standout example of this year’s theme in action.

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Sten Studio: Lithic Bloom — A Stone Garden of Botanical Forms

Within the Curio section, Mexico City–based Sten Studio debuted Lithic Bloom, a sculptural garden that reinterpreted global flora through stone. At its center was Florea, a modular arrangement capturing the organic gestures of blooming petals. Surrounding it were the peony-inspired Peonara stool, leaf-like Folia tables, and seven towering lithic sentinels, some functioning as floor lamps and one as a scent diffuser.

The ensemble created a meditative, sensory environment exploring fragility, permanence, and the poetic tension between nature and mineral material. The Hydraea chair — carved from blue calcite to symbolize water — anchored the installation’s narrative of connection and renewal.

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Kohler: A Pearlized Innovation That Moves With Light

Kohler’s latest innovation, Pearlized, transformed ceramic surfaces into iridescent canvases that shifted with every movement. Developed with artist David Franklin during his Kohler MakerSpace residency, the finish debuted on the Derring Carillon Artist Editions sink after early experiments on ceramic fish for a Chicago museum installation revealed the luminous potential of PVD technology on clay.

At Design Miami, Kohler partnered with Harry Nuriev of Crosby Studios to unveil a rippling, immersive landscape where Pearlized surfaces played with light and perspective. The installation embodied the spirit of Make. Believe. through its fluidity and dreamlike quality. A Design Talk titled The Alchemy of Making further explored how artistic experimentation and engineering collaboration continue to shape the company’s design breakthroughs.

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A New Global Chapter: Design Miami × Alserkal

This year also marked a significant moment for the fair’s global evolution: Design Miami announced a new multi-year partnership with Alserkal, the Dubai-based cultural enterprise. Together they will launch a collectible design platform with a flagship fair debuting in Dubai in 2027, signaling Design Miami’s commitment to fostering international, regional, and cross-cultural dialogues in design.

Looking Ahead: Designing the Future We Can Believe In

Design Miami 2025 affirmed that Make. Believe. is more than a theme — it is a vision of design as a tool for transforming the world we inhabit. Across monumental ceramics, iridescent finishes, stone gardens, reconstituted woods, and playful public installations, this year’s exhibitors demonstrated that imagination remains one of design’s most powerful materials.

As Miami looks to another year of cultural programming and global design exchange, anticipation is already building for the next edition.

For updates and announcements on Design Miami 2026, visit: designmiami.com/fair/miami-2025

Read more Art & Culture and Art Basel 2025 news here.

 

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